Word: comecon
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Border Bonfires. Everyone understood Nikita's problems. He had to keep Walter Ulbricht happy and hopeful, for beleaguered East Germany is still the machine shop of the Communist bloc, supplying tools, autos and heavy equipment to virtually all the satellite nations in the COMECON trade partnership. Khrushchev was also under pressure to produce a success of some kind for October's 22nd Party Congress in Moscow, when all his policies will come under scrutiny...
Soviet Russia, as the all-powerful supplier of the satellites' raw materials, calls all the COMECON tunes. All deals are bilateral, for there is no free exchange of goods in Communism's uncommon market. The Russians have refused to supply raw materials to the Rumanians to build a new truck factory, because COMECON had already designated the Poles as truckmakers...
...Russian iron ore for their new $1.5 billion steel plant rising at Kosice, the Czechs have had to sign a contract to supply the Russians with mining machinery to help boost Soviet ore production. So prickly, in fact, are the hedges between COMECON partners that in the pipeline network now being laid to carry Volga oil to East German, Czech and Hungarian factories, each country builds and owns the part within its territory. "There is no charity among Communists," says a Czech official. "Business is business...
Less Visible Chains. Because the Soviet Union alone is excused from limiting itself to certain specialties, COMECON is fast binding the satellites to greater dependence on Russia than they knew in Stalin's time. By 1965 Russia's share of Czech foreign trade will rise from a third to more than half...
...COMECON claims that all Eastern economies are growing faster than those of Western Europe. They should, because they started from so much farther back. And they still have a long way to go, though the Reds sometimes sally spectacularly at economic targets of opportunity, e.g., when Russia tries to capture Nasser's economy by offering to build the billion-dollar Aswan Dam for him. Communist-bloc imports and exports still make up less than 10% of world trade...